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A Spray Like a Punch in the Face

Last week, a girl in the Bronx pulled out a can of pepper spray and used it in a fight with two other girls in her high school, an event that resulted in her arrest, her mother’s arrest and a report on WNBC.

The mother got locked up because she bought the stuff and gave it to her daughter, and the law in New York is strict about who can carry it — no teenagers, no felons — and how it is used. There was a long legislative fight over whether people should be allowed to carry it, and in 1996, New York became the last state to make it legal, over the objections of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who felt the rules were lax.

The law requires the following label to appear on the cans:

“The use of this substance or device for any purpose other than self-defense is a criminal offense under the law.”

Pepper spray is regulated with other dangerous weapons. For anyone interested in the effect it has on people hit with it, there are plenty of videos available online. You can hear agonizing screams, especially when it hits the mucous membranes and soft tissue like the eyes.

Or you can check in with Chelsea Elliott, 25, who learned about it Saturday while standing on the sidewalk on East 12th Street with others who had been part of a march protesting elements of the American economic system.

“I felt something weird and wet on my face,” she said. “I said, ‘What’s that?’ Then it burned so bad, my eyes — it was unbelievably intense. My eyes were on fire.”

There are now multiple videos available that show some or all of the encounter, which took place at the end of a march that began in the financial district, where Occupy Wall Street has based itself for more than a week, and continuing to Union Square, a little more than two miles. The protesters did not have a permit, walked the wrong way up some streets, and when the police tried to steer them, just plowed ahead. It’s a crowded city: a few hundred people wanted to march anywhere they felt like it, and a few hundred thousand people were going about their lives. In between were the police.

Inevitably, things came to a head.

“It got kind of weird around Union Square,” Ms. Elliott said. “That’s when they tried to corral us into those nets. The march had ended. I was exhausted — I just wanted to walk back to Wall Street.”

She was standing in one of the nets, occasionally screaming when someone was arrested.

Then a deputy inspector, a senior rank in the Police Department, walked up to the corral, quickly doused several people standing there with pepper spray, and just walked off. It stunned the protesters and police officers standing around them.

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“I was in a state of shock,” Ms. Elliott said. “The officer I was talking to said, ‘Thanks for the warning.’ ”

IN the video, the deputy inspector, Anthony Bologna, looked as if he were spraying cockroaches. When asked about the matter, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, Paul J. Browne, said it had been used “appropriately.”

In his statement, he also said, “Pepper spray was used once after individuals confronted officers and tried to prevent them from deploying a mesh barrier — something that was edited out or otherwise not captured in the video.”

Other videos have surfaced, and it is hard to square the events described by Mr. Browne with what they show. Earlier in the week, after a different encounter, Mr. Browne said a man had been arrested “for jumping a police barrier and resisting arrest.” A sequence of photographs published on the City Room blog of The New York Times showed precisely the opposite: a deputy inspector tried to pull a protester over a barrier, and then he jumped over to grab the protester. Mr. Browne later said he had gotten his facts scrambled.

It is axiomatic that early reports in confusing situations are usually wrong.

The pepper spray videos have gone around the world, trailed by Mr. Browne’s instant justification and defense of them. The combination has done little credit to the Police Department, which, in fact, has had a generally civil and accommodating relationship with the protesters, according to many people on the scene.

If a nightstick were substituted for pepper spray, a conventional weapon instead of an exotic one, the events on 12th Street would bear a strong resemblance to simple assault.